Hear Me Out: Grunge never actually existed
In the context of rock and roll, grunge might be one of the most overexplained genres in the world.
Everyone likes to romanticise the idea that the world was one way before ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took over the world, and then as soon as Nirvana became big, everyone threw out their makeup and spandex and started getting more authentic with their music. Nothing is ever really that clean, and when you start looking at the major traits of grunge, the whole genre might not have existed at all.
I know how that sounds when talking about one of the single biggest genres of the 1990s, but you have to start looking at everything around the Seattle scene before making a judgment call. There are so many bands that deserve the credit for pioneering a bold new movement for rock and roll, but if I were to ask you to describe what grunge is all about, what would you say it was supposed to be?
I suppose that it could be described as heavy music made by disaffected people in their 20s to some extent, right? By that definition, that means Black Sabbath belong in the grunge category to a certain extent, and that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Well, it would have to come from Seattle then as well, surely. Well, Jimi Hendrix made his fair share of heavy music, and he grew up in Seattle, and he’s not listed as grunge, either, so that baseline description is out the window, too.
You would probably have better luck looking at the bands that identified as grunge back in the day, but if you look at anyone in the Seattle scene, not many of them uttered that word all that much. Any Seattleite who mentioned the word only happened once when the early employees at Sub Pop talked about their bands as such, but when the rest of the world latched onto it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Seattle band that didn’t want to run away from that definition.
Granted, grunge is at least identifiable enough to have a trademark ‘Big Four’ of the genre whenever people talk about it. But that also tends to fall apart when you start looking at the people that everyone thinks belong in that class, because really, what sonic traits do bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana all have in common?
When you break everything down, Kurt Cobain was a punk songwriter who happened to write great pop songs, Alice in Chains was the closest to heavy metal out of all of them, Eddie Vedder’s croon sounded closer to what the classic rock stalwarts were doing, and Chris Cornell was making strange avant-garde art pieces that sounded like if Led Zeppelin were a prog band… None of these trademarks sound the same, and the more that you hear the bands talking about it, they weren’t too thrilled with everything.
Cobain always regretted being put into a box when Nirvana first got big, and even though Pearl Jam got a lot of exposure on MTV, there are more than a few interviews where Stone Gossard didn’t even consider the word ‘grunge’ as part of his musical vocabulary. In fact, the term didn’t even start becoming a thing until some of the biggest names from completely different parts of the country started becoming big.
Grunge was easy for people to identify back in the day, but when looking at the other bands coming out at the time, they weren’t exactly doing the same thing. Silverchair and Stone Temple Pilots were clearly trying to write songs that would get on the radio, whereas the Seattle crowd could have cared less whether they played for a bunch of their friends or an entire stadium full of people.
And when you think about it, grunge seemed to be more of a fashion than anything else once the bands started hitting the big time. Everyone in the Seattle scene liked the idea of embracing individuality, so when they saw people like Warrant and Poison trying their best to get darker as the years went on, all that people like Vedder or even Mark Arm from Mudhoney could do was shake their head and wonder where it all went wrong.
So when you start talking about these bands, calling them grunge isn’t always going to be the greatest descriptor. They are all fantastic groups, and they deserve every bit of their success for pioneering a new sound on the charts, but if you were to ask them, their music is best described as Seattle music and be left at that.
